Report: Lower Performing Software Engineering Teams Benefit More From AI
DevOps.com, Tuesday, March 10th, 2026
An analysis of 2,000 organizations worldwide finds that historically lower performing software engineering teams are seeing nearly a 50% improvement in lead time to delivery, a four times greater rate of improvement over higher performing teams that have adopted AI coding tools.
Conducted by Plandek, a provider of a developer productivity intelligence platform, the report also notes that despite that improvement, lower performing software engineering teams still deliver less than half the output per engineer compared to high-performing teams. For example, bottom-quartile teams still take more than 35 hours to merge pull requests, compared to under 21 hours for top performers, according to the report.
Top teams also ship software in under 22.5 days on average, while bottom-quartile teams take more than 62 days. High-performing teams complete over two-thirds of their planned sprint work, nearly twice as much as low-performing teams, which complete less than half and regularly miss the goals they set.